Understanding Resilience – a Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Nowadays we face a shift of paradigm from risk management to resilience management. Resilience is a complex concept that has become not just a “buzzword”, but also a meta-concept used in fields as far apart as biology, psychology, environmental studies, system-of-systems engineering and more. In this regard, the authors conducted fundamental research (mainly a literature review of a selection of open-source papers) to increase awareness towards the conceptual elements related to resilience. There were defined three resilience-related concepts: engineering resilience, organizational resilience and socioecological resilience. Afterwards, the main characteristics of resilient systems were highlighted. Nevertheless, the authors described a possible organizational resilience framework. The 6 suggested and detailed steps are: the comprehensive resilience analysis encompassing existing or new methodologies – audit, defining and fleshing out needed strategies, the actual design of measures to be implemented, the implementation phase of the previously designed measures, the monitoring step, and the evaluation phase of the success of the various implemented measures. The main limitation of the present research is the lack of validation of the proposed methodology.